Skaneateles, NY -- Pianist Conrad Tao last performed at the Skaneateles Festival in 2007. The 15-year-old hopes audiences will hear differences when he performs there again Aug. 22.

"I'd like to think that they would feel it's matured and has become more layered and more nuanced," he says in a phone interview during a midday study break at the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado.

"I'd like to think, though, that my performing, in general, has become more sophisticated than from two years ago."

Tao will play Mendelssohn's Concerto No. 1 in G minor, a piece he learned when he was 10 and last performed in Italy in 2007.

"I'm picking it up again. It's a very youthful piece, which I think was suitable, especially when I first learned it. It's a very, very brilliant work," he says. "The last movement, in particular, is filled with a lot of exuberance. So it's a very fun piece to listen to and to play."

Skaneateles Fest is but one stop on Tao's summer concert tour, interspersed with his studies at Aspen. Earlier this summer, he appeared at Ravinia Festival in Chicago and in Napa Valley in California at the end of July.

In conversation, the musician works at dispelling the assumptions of a prodigy who began playing piano at 18 months, had his first music lessons on the violin at 3 years old and piano lessons six months later, gave his first piano recital at 4 and composes. The home-schooled Tao says he has a life.

"I feel that my interests do extend beyond classical music," he says.

"I don't close my mind to other music and I listen to a bit of a potpourri of different sounds. But also beyond that, also my interests go outside of the practice room. I think that I'm lucky that I choose to fulfill myself sometimes not simply by practicing a piece over and over again, but rather by trying to absorb different cultures and different aspects of daily life, in order to help influence my music making."